Stories by Thor Olavsrud

In Pictures: 10 real-world Big Data deployments that will change our lives

The amount of data in the world is increasing exponentially, doubling every 18 months. Here are 10 real-world Big Data deployments you may not have realized were driven by big data.

In pictures: 12 scams of Christmas and how to avoid them

'Tis the season for online scams. Here are 12 of the most dangerous scams you're likely to see this holiday season.

In Pictures: 8 real-world Big Data deployments

The amount of data in the world doubles every 18 months. Here's a look at eight real-world big data deployments in a variety of industries.

In Pictures: 10 top Mobile Application Development Platforms

Development organisations are increasingly looking for a Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP) that can support their needs for both current and future projects. Here are 10 that have been identified as leaders in the field.

In Pictures: 9 open source Big Data technologies to watch

With more and more companies storing more and more data and hoping to leverage it for actionable insights, Big Data is making a big splash these days. Open source technology is at the core of most Big Data initiatives. Here are nine key open source Big Data technologies to keep an eye on.

In Pictures: 10 mobile device management apps to take charge of BYOD

Managing devices in a BYOD environment is no mean feat, and the right mobile device management (MDM) product can be a key component in making it work. Here are 10 leading MDM products on the market today.

How to avoid the perils of virtualization and Cloud stall

Technologies like virtualization and cloud computing promise enormous leaps in efficiency and flexibility, but they can lead organizations into a quagmire if they don't plan properly for the transition, says Bill Hurley, CIO, CTO and executive vice president of Westcon Group. Without proper planning, organizations can stall in the midst of their transitions to virtualized environments or the cloud, finding themselves with a bundle of sunk costs and no path forward.

Do insecure open source components threaten your apps?

Since Apache Maven, the brainchild of Sonatype founder Jason van Zyl, emerged as a top-level Apache Software Foundation project in 2003, the Central Repository has become a primary source of open source components. Jackson says the Central Repository receives four billion requests per year for its 300,000 components.

Five ways to prepare for Big Data with scale-out NAS

As enterprises seek to move into the big data world -- digitizing paper documents and saving email communications, Word docs, Excel files and all sorts of other unstructured data with the hopes of mining them for actionable business intelligence -- they need to address a big problem up front: Storage.